This doctoral thesis explores the cardinal importance of cosmological and theological narratives in our engagement with the contemporary ecological transition. Drawing upon the analyses of political philosophers Hans Jonas ...

The aim of this thesis is to identify the structure of personality below the factor level in chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas in terms of both facets and items and to investigate the development of these lower-order ...

There is a growing consensus that the forgetting of information from long-term memory occurs as a result of interference. Interference is experienced when the encountering of extraneous stimuli impedes the retention and ...

Around the world, human-animal inequality is widespread; the meat industry alone slaughters billions of animals each year. Some human groups face similar inequalities. For example, drug addicts are routinely persecuted ...

Language use is variable, such as we can call the same object umbrella or brolly. But what determines this variability? This thesis aimed at better understanding how speakers vary the words they use during dialogue, by ...

At the heart of this thesis is the following question: why do we categorise two
objects (e.g., an apple and a banana) as instances of the same concept (e.g., the
concept fruit) despite their perceptual differences? This ...

The development of the classification systems of psychiatric disorders illustrates a
long-term debate on whether a discrete and categorical or a continuum and
spectral view best describes psychiatric disorders. This ...

Current research on language evolution has provided considerable insight into the emergence of linguistic structure, but much of this research does not account for how language users access speaker meanings to build mappings ...

Research on medical teams constantly recognise the crucial value of communication. Studies
on various medical teams, such as surgery and trauma, provide evidence for how
communication either affects or is affected by a ...

This thesis successfully accomplishes two major aims. First, it explores the
relationship between dehumanization, objectification, and men’s sexual
aggression. Correlational and experimental results robustly support a ...

Poorer health literacy—the ability to acquire, understand and use health information
to make better health decisions—has been associated with worse health outcomes.
Poorer cognitive ability has also been found to predict ...

Working Memory (WM) refers to cognitive functions that support the ready
availability of a small amount of information temporarily, while we undertake
ongoing actions and mental activities (e.g., Logie & Cowan, 2015), ...

Language is humanity’s key tool for communication. This entails the fact that it
generally occurs in interaction between two or more individuals. However, we
do not yet have a theory of language variation and change that ...

This thesis explores whether sensorimotor enactivism can be extended to flavour and
smell perception. Sensorimotor enactivism claims that perceptual experience is
constituted by skilful bodily engagement with the world. ...

Background
Research regarding the development of executive functions (EFs) and their
association with educational attainment has disproportionately focused on younger
ages, mainly pre-schoolers and primary school aged ...

This thesis examines 2- and 3-year-olds’ understanding of social cues (specifically body
orientation and pointing) and grammatical cues (specifically number marking) to
reference in a series of three experiments using ...

In this thesis, I discuss, from a metatheoretical perspective, how variationist
sociolinguistics seems to be undergoing a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense.
Roughly around the turn of the millennium, sociolinguists ...